One of the challenges for us amateur political pundits, ie, those not in the professional left, is that we don't fit neatly into the 24 hour news cycle. We have opinions we'd like to share on issues that matter to us, and are excited when people get started up talking about them, but we don't necessarily have 1,000 word essays ready to go five minutes after some post starts making the rounds [warning, this one approaches 2,000]. However, a number of times some issue or other flares up momentarily that actually has a great deal to explore beneath the surface.
David Sirota likes to take a passionate tone in his pieces, and naturally, that makes for great entertainment fodder. I'm a little surprised at how strong the pushback is, because we could use some more passion in our party, and anyway, getting fired up and ready to go is what we've supposed to have been doing, right?
Sometimes I agree with him (this piece), sometimes I don't (coming soon). That's the fun of living in a country with 300+ million opinions. Recently, he highlighted an area that is of some interest and import to me, so I thought I'd expand a little more into the substance.
Specifically, Sirota called out a $10 million program by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) that was linking development funds to training classes for outsourcing and IT jobs in Sri Lanka, among other industry support (like for textiles and construction). Now, I know that campaign promises are mostly just hot air, but it's hard to find examples of more obvious awkwardness than when our government is using the foreign aid budget to help transnational corporations outsource IT work. That's a mouthful of inconsistencies, to say the least.
From the Information Week article:
Under director Rajiv Shah, the United States Agency for International Development will partner with private outsourcers in Sri Lanka to teach workers there advanced IT skills like Enterprise Java (Java EE) programming, as well as skills in business process outsourcing and call center support. USAID will also help the trainees brush up on their English language proficiency.
USAID is contributing about $10 million to the effort, while its private partners are investing roughly $26 million.
But at a deeper level, away from the politics, this program really highlights some fundamental quandaries with the way 'the West' does aid. Now, this is not a screed against development assistance or international trade in theory. I'm a much stronger supporter of actual free trade than most Democrats, and I would dramatically increase the foreign aid budget if I had my magic wand and unlimited power. My main beef with the corporate trade pacts of the past couple decades is that they're not free trade pacts. They are specifically written to circumvent the basic rules by which market economics is designed to function, like the ability of locally autonomous citizens to legislate culturally-desirable protections for the environment, worker rights, living wages, court processes, slavery, child labor, and so forth. They are specifically designed to make global capital more mobile while simultaneously restricting global labor.
Similarly, just because 'we' call something 'aid', that doesn't mean it actually helps. There is a great amount of arrogance and paternalism in the notion that we have the answers for the poor nations of the world, and an amazing amount of some aid projects is devoted to things like 'technical assistance'. If you just learn English and Java, you won't have to worry about child mortality, gender inequality, or clean water. We've been dealing with the need to civilize the savages for a long time, and we need to be aware of this tendency. That doesn't make helping wrong; it means we have an obligation to be conscientious about acting like superiors to subordinates instead of equal partners sharing ideas and resources. This is particularly tricky with entities like USAID because USAID's mission isn't explicitly poverty alleviation. Its mission is to support the foreign policy objectives of the United States. This naturally leads to the question of what happens when local interests conflict with 'our' interests. It's very important to remember that the foreign aid budget in the United States is controlled by the Defense Department and the State Department; we have no Cabinet-level Department of Foreign Aid whose objectives are independent from defense and diplomacy. Imagine, for example, how things might be different if the Labor Department, the Justice Department, and the Environmental Protection Agency were divisions within the Commerce Department instead of being their own Cabinet-level agencies.
More practically, often development funds aid isn't actually aid. It's a 'public-private partnership' where the government kicks in public monies to support a private project. I'm all for actual aid, investments in the public commons of clean water and basic medical care and primary education and so forth. But when public monies end up supporting private projects, that's not the public commons. That's private gains being funded by taxpayers. Particularly troubling, though, is that these aren't 'small-business' type private interests. It's usually well-connected, well-to-do interests that realize the bulk of the benefit. That's what's interesting about the Information Week article Sirota cited. It explicitly lays out the interest of transnational outsourcing and IT firms in getting into this project. And then there's the transparency and fraud problems. How's that development money in Iraq going? The DOD can't even say where it is.
Imagine what we could do with $10 million instead. That would do a lot to provide basic medical care, or disaster response, or invest in clean water solutions (things as simple as sharing well building techniques), or primary education.
Furthermore (assuming that the goal of foreign aid is poverty alleviation), I would suggest that poverty is relative. It varies by place and by culture and by expectation. And we - the West generally, and the US in particular - bear responsibility for making some kinds of global poverty worse. In this particular story, we're talking about workers in Sri Lanka, and one of the sympathies is that well, they must be really poor, so they need whatever we can give them, even if maybe it benefits a few people more than most. Well, guess what? Sri Lanka actually isn't that poor.
The CIA assembles a very handy online resource called the CIA World Fact Book. While GDP isn't the only measure of national output, it's helpful in making rough comparisons among countries and across time. When we talk about economic power, we're usually talking in aggregate. Countries like China, Russia, India, and Brazil are important in large part due to their absolute size. On a per capita basis, would you be surprised to learn that Sri Lanka would fit right in? In fact, of those four, only Russia is in the top 100 (out of 227 entries tracked). China, that nation we're supposed to fear rising up in the east threatening our position in the world, is only 20 slots above Sri Lanka. India is ranked lower!
In fact, fully one-third of the countries on the list are poorer than Sri Lanka, even other South Asian nations like Burma, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Pakistan. Countries where the US has had troops do not fare well, from the Philippines and Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan. This is not to say there's nothing we can do in Sri Lanka. But it's worth putting it in context that there's nothing uniquely dire, either. Earthquake support in Haiti would be much more valuable. Many, many countries are much, much poorer, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa and other parts of South Asia. One of the truly dismal data points about the combined failures of military occupation and the drug war is that Afghanistan is the only non-African nation in the bottom 10. The easiest foreign aid project in the world at the moment would be getting the US military to stop blowing stuff up there. Compared to Afghanistan, Sri Lanka is a pillar of educational possibility and social stability, a hotbed of industry and IT prowess.
Another way to think about aid is to make sure it's about empowerment, not dependence. Ask why the need can't be met by local resources and address that underlying problem. That's what separates development from disaster relief - when it's a famine or a hurricane or something, you get people food, water, blankets, medical kits, and so forth. But the rest of the time, you ask why people can't provide those in the first place. What is it about the situation that is hindering development? Is the need locally generated, or superimposed from the outside? In this case, it is worth pondering why there aren't training opportunities available. What prevents private businesses from investing the other $10 million in the project? Is that an admission that the project isn't really worth doing; it's only viable if the government picks up the tab? Once you go down this mode of thinking, it starts to sound very much like a whole lot of other policy areas in the US where tax breaks and credits and rebates and deferments have to be kicked in by We the People to make things like stadiums and factories and farm fields profitable.
I'm speaking generally about aid here, but I would offer one comment specific to training, as well. I heartily endorse public investment in public education. In the US, we would be well-served by offering universal daycare/preschool at the primary end and universal community college at the post-secondary end. In Sri Lanka, one of the UN's Millennium Development Goals is specifically targeting education (Goal 2), and Sri Lanka is a great success story, a model for the rest of South Asia. From the UN,
Sri Lanka is the best performer in South Asia in primary school indicators and is on track towards achieving universal primary education, with a net enrolment ratio in primary education in 2003 of 98.35%. Primary, secondary and tertiary education is free in Sri Lanka and, since 1997, education for the 5-14 year age group has been mandatory and facilitated through an islandwide network of 10,475 primary and secondary schools. However Sri Lanka needs to ensure that policies promoting the participation of poor, rural, street and other disadvantaged children are in place.
In 2002, 97.6% of the children enrolled at primary school reached Grade 5 and youth literacy rates reached 95.6%.
Training programs are an entirely different story. They are one window into the corporate era of the Reagan-Bush view that consolidated wealth and power is the best road for global peace and prosperity. They are part of what has been termed The Great Risk Shift (that's the same Hacker of public option fame, fyi). You see, in the trickle-down economy, employers are no longer expected to train workers. Instead, workers are expected to show up to the job ready to go, to hit the ground running. The notion that the public - taxpayers - should pay part of the costs for specific training needed by private employers makes this a particularly ineffective form of development assistance.
One final note on potential responses that may sound persuasive but I think miss the larger picture - or require inconsistent application to other policy areas:
- This is only a $10 million program, so it's not a big deal. Sounds reasonable, except it conveniently conflicts with the other explanation, that we can't expect to undo 3 decades of conservative rule in 3 years. The value of analyzing one specific program is that it doesn't come with the baggage of a massive multi-billion dollar effort. There's no compromise or nuance to worry about: it's a specific program. It is what it is. It's either a valuable expense or it's not. In order to be specific, it has to be pretty small.
- Tsunami/Tamil Tigers/Civil War/etc. Yeap. So let's help people rebuild, reclaim land expropriated by wealthy interests, and otherwise support basic human needs and disaster relief. In other words, provide aid. See point 1: here's the value of specificity. This money is not going to anything remotely related to disaster relief and recovery from war. And to use this line of reasoning, you have to oppose the President's basing of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. That, by definition, is promoting this kind of instability.
- The program trades off with employment in other countries, not the US. This is where goals become important. If our goal is to build industry in Sri Lanka, then heck yeah, moving jobs from India is an easy way to do it. India is a much larger country than Sri Lanka, they won't miss a few. But more to the point, how does that help anyone? We're talking about public dollars covering costs that would otherwise be incurred by private companies. If an Indian firm wants to hire Sri Lankan workers, let that firm pay for training. If that renders an Indian worker preferable to a Sri Lankan worker, who cares? At that level, we're talking a zero-sum game; there's no value added by creating another business process outsourcing specialist. But if our goals are to provide aid to unemployed persons in South Asian countries, then provide actual aid that helps unemployed people perform work that invests in the local economy.
I would close by saying that it's perfectly legitimate to defend the USAID program in Sri Lanka. There are serious arguments to be made both for and against. But if these kinds of factors aren't taken into account, it makes for rather difficult policy-making and political messaging. There are tradeoffs involved among different goals of US foreign policy; some goals aren't compatible at all. When the President goes around talking about the evils of outsourcing and protecting American jobs and supporting high tech sectors like IT, what are we to make of it? What does it mean? What is the policy of our government when it comes to things like aid, trade, and diplomacy? Are we trying to work in partnership with our fellow global citizens to further development goals like those outlined by the UN's MDGs? Or are we supporting the globalization of western 'capitalism' where the connected few get public support for private gain?
Crossposted at the Seminal at FDL.